Advanced Window Managers in the UNIX World

In the Unix world of computing, it is possible to exchange your window manager with an advanced one. The window manager’s main purpose is to move/resize windows on the screen. These improved window managers differ from the way people are used to interact with windows in the Microsoft Windows world.Introduction The main purpose of a window manager actually should be — well — to manage windows. However, nearly all widespread window managers like those included in Microsoft Windows or in MacOS only allow you to manually move/resize/maximize and minimize windows. In my opinion, it should really try to manage my windows for me by automatically moving or resizing them when appropriate.

This means, that it should dynamically change the window layout when new windows are created or old ones are destroyed. Moreover it is essential that an advanced manager can easily be used with the keyboard only. This can be best described by Tuomo Valkonen — “the” person in terms of innovative user inteface design — himself:

Present-day graphical user interfaces are far less usable than they are praised to be. Usability simply does not equal low learning curve, as the Official Truth seems to be these days. Power and keyboard users, those who just do not like or have medical problems with mice, are forgotten when “modern” graphical programs are designed. Mouse-based search-and-click interfaces simply are not efficient except for some very specific tasks and often involve lots of tedious repetitive tasks. And while most widget-based GUIs provide keyboard shortcuts to some operations, the general application design still makes them difficult to use from the keyboard. For example, tabbing through dialog entries is difficult if the dialog is laid out in a complex fashion. Most command line and other text mode programs are simply much more usable once you get used to them, but are limited in their output capabilities.

1. PWM & Ion

Tuomo Valkonen was the first one who tried in an experiment to create a different kind of window management model. This attempt to create a totally new way to interact with windows was later copied by several other window manager’s like TrsWM or WMI.

1.1 PWM

This was the first window manager which featured tabs in the title bar. If you open up 3 browser windows, normally these windows are all over the screen with different locations and sizes. With a tabbed window manager you can group them together and easily manage all grouped windows simultaneously. In order to add a window to a group you just need to drag it the group and drop it. You can also configure PWM to auto-group certain application windows (in our case, we would set it up to group all browser windows into one group).

So as you can see in the next screenshot, all 3 browser windows share one common title bar, and if I chose to maximize one window, the other two would be maximized too automatically:

1.2 Ion

The solution of PWM solved some problems, but it was still a difficult task to completely manage all windows with the keyboard only. Tuomo Valkonen therefore quickly improved his own PWM and came up with the first tabbed and tiling window manager.

It tries to address the navigation problem by dividing the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames that take up the whole screen. By using this frame-based instead of coordinate-based approach, it is conveniently possible to move between the frames entirely with the keyboard, because by this window layout it’s always possible to say which is the next frame on the right/left/top/bottom side of the current one.

So in the next figure, if I want to quickly switch from my tv application on the bottom right to my browser, I just need to tell Ion (by keyboard shortcuts) to switch to the left window.

Another big advantage of this frame-based layout is scriptability. Since the frame layout is saved after a restart and I can have custom names for all of my frames, I can configure Ion so that if I start large application windows like browsers or e-mail clients, they are moved to the upper left frame. On the other hand, small applications like an MP3 player or instant messanger should go in a small frame on the right. Also moving windows can be done very conveniently, since I don’t need to move them pixelwise, but I just need to drag the window from one frame to another and drop it. Then the window will occupy the full space of the frame.

Describing the full feature set of Ion would surely break the scope of this article, but here are other excellent features of Ion:

– Make all windows full screen – Fully extendable with Lua scripts – A Query module with autocompletion. Use this to quickly start programs. – Small and fast

2. WMI – Window Manager Improved

WMI is a very new project and it’s development started at the end of 2003. It tries to feature all good things from Ion but also to bring tiling window managers to the masses by making them easier to use.

To configure Ion (or newer versions of PWM) you need to have some knowledge of a turing complete scripting language called Lua.

In contrast, WMI let’s you configure some settings at runtime and other things like the keybindings in a simple text file. Furthermore it has an always visible status bar which shows the current time, a pager and something like a task bar which lists running applications. This makes it easier for users who do not want to completely rely on the keyboard for these commands.

WMI also breaks the concept, that all windows must not overlap but combines the advantages of a tiled window manager with the possibility of having some windows floating above the others. While a tiled layout is suitable for most application, for some special applications like a media player, it’s sometimes convenient to be able to move the player around above all other windows.

Another very interesting feature of WMI is the close connection to the famous vi editor. So, people accustomed to this great editor will feel like at home when using WMI.

3. Exposé

To be exact, Exposé is actually not a window manager, but a feature of newer versions of Apple’s window manager for MacOS X. It does not try to arrange windows non-overlapping nor does it try to favor the keyboard in window management. However, by pressing a keyboard shortcut it tries to make it easier to select the next window by temporarily moving (and resizing) all application windows so that they don’t overlap. Now, the user sees all windows at the same time, and can select one with the mouse. Afterwards, all windows are moved to their previous location and the selected window is made topmost.

About the authorThis article was written by Martin Stubenschrott. He lives in Austria and studies Computer Science at the Technical University of Vienna. He is a long term Ion user and enjoys editing everything text-based with vim.

72 Comments

2004-05-06 7:30 am

I like other viewpoints on how the desktop should be.

Everyone’s desktop interface is cluttered. I personally use window shading and a rigid (albeit manual) layout to deal with copious applications open at one time. I must say that keyboard navigation has never appealed to me a great deal, not has running applications in full screen mode.

Apple users are starting to use Expose almost exclusively. Ignoring all other means of handling multiple windows.

However each to their own. The example presented I think are the first stages of producing window managers that really do arrange windows intelligently and attempt optimal window positioning and size. This would arguably make using The Gimp a lot easier for a start.

2004-05-06 7:37 am

However, nearly all widespread window managers like those included in Microsoft Windows or in MacOS only allow you to manually move/resize/maximize and minimize windows. In my opinion, it should really try to manage my windows for me by automatically moving or resizing them when appropriate.

Just because they implement manual positioning doesn’t imply that this is also their limitation.

2004-05-06 7:37 am

a patch for metacity, called “expocity” (??) google that!

2004-05-06 7:43 am

Notice the lack of useless eye candy in the listed window managers. I don’t like my OS moving things around for me becasue then I have to spend my time looking around for it. This is the reason I kill XP’s “group similar tasks” feature.

I personally hate the current trend of wasting CPU and space to round off corners of my windows and give task bar items a big rounded bevel. Task bar real estate is far too valuble to throw away for stupid gee wiz graphics.

The reason KDE has 4 different desktop buttons to begin with is becasue you can only open 4 windows per desktop before the entire taskbar is consumed.

The top taskbar in this screenshot is an example of exactly what a taskbar should look like.

ION seems to get many of the concepts right, but the user needs manual control over the size of the windows on the desktop. Applications can simply continue to open to the last dimention that was used. Thiis is not really a problem.

Blackbox is out of my way and light but lacks the task management needed to multitask.

I am using the following settings under XP.

Classic start menu

task grouping off

win 2k theme

system > advanced > performance > adjust for best

Another thing, when I minimise a windows I don’t want to watch an animation of it moving, I just want it to not be there any more.

It is my opinion that Linux would make greater progress on the desktop with a fast light weight aproach rather than trying so hard to be a second rate XP knock off.

2004-05-06 7:43 am

Possible under X too… for more info on how to do it look for a program called wmctrl.

2004-05-06 7:52 am

First a few things…

1: KDE runs on OSes other than Linux.

2: Very few, if any, window managers are linux dependent.

3: Just becuase a few window managers try to emulate a look does not mean all do and there are plenty off good ones that don’t.

4: Virtual desktops are great for task grouping… /me has 20 of them all of which are hotkeyed.

5: Like any thing worth while you will have to look a bit till you find one your truely like.

Now on to the important stuff… well if you like blackbox, but don’t like everything about it… start looking at some of it’s clones such as fluxbox and ect… windowmaker and the like may be worth a look too…

All of the “useless pixels” you refer to do more than just waste space: they make the environment enjoyable to use. I tried Ion and could never use it just because of how ugly it is. Some people will complain that too much eye candy will detract from the usability or become a distraction. I find Ion to be the converse: so plain that it is distracting.

Window managers are a lot like cars: functionality will only go so far. You also need to have some type of elegant form to really enjoy using them and everyone knows that a happy worker is a productive worker! If functionality was the only factor, we’d all be driving K-cars with wooden benches instead of seats, no radio, no climate control, etc. Sure, they would get you from A to B, but it would be a pretty crappy ride.

The trick is finding the happy medium between form and functionality. Too much emphasis on one will surely be a detriment to overall productivity.

2004-05-06 8:15 am

To each his own. I love eye candy, it makes me want to use the computer more and makes me enjoy time spent in front of it more. I don’t like wasted space though, and I don’t like bad eye candy that’s colorful but lacks style and class like Luna aka Suicide Blue. Silver really should be the XP default, but of course it doesn’t hold a candle to the uber-classy OS X, or the Thinkeramic or Baghira themes for KDE.

If I had to use the window manager in the screen shot you linked to I would probably cry. (Or quit whatever job was making me use that ugly thing.) I just can’t take all that boxiness, drabness and grayness. I want a desktop that makes you go “wow”, not one that looks like it belongs on a 486 in 1994. Sure eye candy takes more cycles, but most of us have PLENTY of those to burn these days.

I like the idea of having windows moved around and re-sized to fit automatically. OS X does this somewhat, like when you change between different applets in the control panel, the size and shape of the window adjusts itself to accommodate all of the icons. I would like to see that kind of thinking extended to the finder and of course to KDE and Windows. Expose is jaw-dropping, fun to use and really the most convenient way to switch between open windows on a Mac, since the Dock isn’t really great for that.

Group Similar Tasks in XP is a usability nightmare, I don’t know anyone who likes that feature and they’re always extremely grateful when I show them how to turn it off. I wonder if Microsoft engineers ever sit down with a room full of end users to find out whether they actually like these features or not, or if they just do whatever they feel like and if the beta testers don’t complain too loud, go with it. (The default layout of the reading pane in Outlook 2003 is another example of WTF??? usability hell.)

As for Linux desktops, most distros ship with a cluttered desktop full of trashy looking icons (I hate desktop icons) and a panel/taskbar that’s crammed with even more needless stuff. It doesn’t take me more than 5 or 10 minutes after a default install to turn KDE into a classy looking environment that rivals the best offerins of Apple and MS, and I think it’s a shame that there’s no distro shipping that looks like what I turn mine into, since I’m really bored with the “let’s copy Windows 98” mantra that most distros follow religiously, and most people who see and use my computer really like it and ask me to install Linux on their computers because of it. (They assume that’s just “what linux looks like”, they don’t know how ugly Mandrake is out of the box.) I posted a screenshot of my heavily customized mandrake 10 desktop here: http://www.divisiontwo.com/pictures/mdk10-Official-With-Baghira-The…

(Check out the way KDE 3.2 automatically uses a thumbnail of the video file as the file’s icon, now that’s cool!)

2004-05-06 8:23 am

Blackbox is out of my way and light but lacks the task management needed to multitask.

Ever tried fluxbox? It puts minimized windows in the “taskbar”.

2004-05-06 8:31 am

I don’t like virtual desktops and I’m not a big fan of desktop hotkeys (Hey I’m allowed my preferences too). I used to use virtual desktops back in the days. Somehow I got out of the habit.

Expose seems to be one way of handling a cluttered desktop. Virtual desktops are another. Windows & some window managers like to group applications on the task bar (which drives me nuts). Others want all apps to be fullscreen.

I like the idea of applications attempting to optimally use screen real estate as long as its reasonably intelligent.

At one point I was thinking about the idea of breaking up the desktop into panels/areas/boxes that used different window management methodology. So perhaps an area on screen for normal app windows and a seperate area for things like buddy lists, mp3 players, Floating Palettes (Gimp, Sodipodi) etc.

Normal App windows are handled as they are currently (perhaps with functionality to tile, cascade, hide or close all windows from the same application)

The other area is treated a little like a button panel. Windows are tiled/arranged, preference is given to windows attached to the application with focus etc.

However I soon realised that there are no easy answers to how desktops should be designed. Each user (if given no other choice) can generally adapt to nearly all of the models used (from System9, OSX, FVWM, KDE, FluxBox, Windows etc). If given the freedom to tailor it to themselves it will, as often as not, end up appearing to be only usable by them.

In my case I realised that while I like chat, music and floating palettes to be visible at all times it would be a colossal waste of space for apps with built in MDI, not to mention a pain for the window manager to determine what went where.

2004-05-06 8:37 am

I have the same complaints about both fluxbox and windowmaker as I do blackbox. None of them have a taskbar (like KDE, Gnome, Windows), which IMHO is an essential item for a DE. Running 20 hotkeyed desktops would work, but I would be going from desktop to desktop going “where did I have that open?”.

My ideal desktop would basicially be fluxbox with a taskbar and desktop icons. It would do everything I need KDE to do but without all the crap.

Re: cibus

yeah but fluxbox still uses the entire taskbar to tell me the title of the window I am already looking at. You can find your other tasks only by bringing up the menu. From a UI perspective this is much more difficult than clicking the app you need in that taskbar with one click.

2004-05-06 8:47 am

Microsoft has applied for a patent for an expose like feature, geared towards virtual desktops.

if you have apps in 4 virtual desktops, it will arrange the 4 VDesktops on the screen with all the apps visible using some 3d eye candy.

There is also the looking-glass that SUN is wondering what to do with.

I hope the kde and other expose like projects will make their stuff distinctly different from Apple’s or they will have problems with these guys.

yeah but fluxbox still uses the entire taskbar to tell me the title of the window I am already looking at. You can find your other tasks only by bringing up the menu. From a UI perspective this is much more difficult than clicking the app you need in that taskbar with one click.

That is not true. Minimized windows are shown in the taskbar in fluxbox. This is however not the case in blackbox. This is what made me switch from bb to fb.(even tough I never minimize windows ).

Fluxbox also has tabbing of similar windows for thos into that… I never got used to it.

Mine isn’t. There is nothing on it but a dock (about 45 icons) and the icons for some partitions. And a background image of the gossamer condor for fun.

At the top right, including the very top right pixel (Fitts Law), the right mouse button gives you a menu listing the programs that are currently running. Select one of these and the screen display changes to show that program _and only that program_ – no clutter, and each program gets the use of the whole screen.

It is also possible to run a shell or small utility on the “desktop” if you want to, or have two related programs share a display.

There can be as many programs running as RAM permits, each with its own display.

2004-05-06 9:28 am

Is this actually more then a moc-up? I also saw it on KDE-Look.org and I would really love to have that, but there isn”t any code.

2004-05-06 9:36 am

I think that is a new feature for Fluxbox. there is a screenshot here of the old way.

This article seems to be rather trivial. How are these window managers “advanced”, other than the fact that they manage their windows in a different way?

2004-05-06 10:02 am

Fluxbox 1.0 is almost ready, won’t probably take long before it is released. It has much more features, and looks better than the old stable FB version, so people interested in Fluxbox could perhaps try the v0.9.9 development version that already works relatively well and reliably.

With many Blackbox derivatives like Openbox it is also possible to use GNOME panels, which makes the WM almost like a real DE.

2004-05-06 10:12 am

Can someone tell me the what desktop environment is he using? The main windows with the tabs, the one the says SkyOS… etc look pretty nice and professional. What theme is it and what program is he using? Looks like KDE and Konqueror but can’t be sure, if this is it, what’s the name of the theme/style being used in the screenshot? The fonts also look very nice. If possible, what’s the name of the font?

2004-05-06 10:14 am

Wow… thats some strange versioning policy 😀

latest stable is 0.1.14 latest devel is 0.9.9!!

2004-05-06 10:17 am

I’m glad this guy is not calling the shots at MS or Apple.

re:tod, also glad your not calling the shots. There is reasons why MS and Apple do what they do to the desktop via “wasting pixels and cycles” if they didn’t people would be sick of looking at the screen. Roundness, shading and so forth make it visualy appealing. What you seam to like would be stepping back into some 80s,90s hell. Also I don’t see how they are wasting pixels, the deskbar would be the same size if it wasn’t rounded. And heck rounding the corners on the windows saves a few pixels for something else . People don’t want tons of junk, but they want style. The idea of going back to classic mode makes me shudder, “year 2004 lets look at 1995” XP brought something very much needed, a fresh look. Something could be better, but at least it’s differant.

Crawling Mushroom Syndicate,

I have to agree with much of what you said and the screen shot is nice, though it is somewhat OSXish, I like OSX but I wouldn’t want the look on anything but OSX, if I’m on a differant OS, time for a differant look.

what is the big deal about the movie clip thumbnail icon, XP has been doing this since day one. I’m sure something had to be doing that before it was. The thumbnail view is another big thing I love in XP.

And whats up with the grouped task bashing? Thats one of the features in XP i couldn’t do without. No more guessing as to which tiny little tab is the app you want. It’s not like windows does any massive shuffling of things around. when it throws things into a column you know right where they are, the relitive position is the same, just not spread across the screen. Give it a chance for a little while, it’s a major time saver and removes a ton of clutter. I know a few who don’t like it, but most seam to love it. I suppose those who don’t like it are also the type who don’t like tabbed browsers. Thats another thing people tend to hate till they try it for a bit and see how great it is.

2004-05-06 10:23 am

Last week I kicked out kde and now I run openbox with rox. It takes a while to understand rox but they have an exellent website to guide you.

The whole “wasting cycles” thing came up again. What is with people. It’s a computer it does stuff with the cycles and current hardware has a major excess of them, use them. So many people seam obsessed with using as little ram as possible or cpu as possible. Even if they have tons of both. So you save all that resource, what are you doing with it? If you just turn the computer off you can save a lot more. Sure its one thing to just waste tons of it pointlessly, say if AIM took 400 megs of ram to do the same thing it does today. But the reason MS and Apple will do things that takes up more ram or cpu is simple because they are doing things to improve the computing experiance. Anyone with over a ghz cpu and 256 megs of ram is hardly every using the full potential of their computer. Why not do something with it. This sorta reminds me of a person who never spends any of their money on anything, just saves it, and not saving it for anything like retirement or anything. They just save every cent till they die so they have a lot of money they will never use. Being money smart is good, but part of making money is to use it to enjoy life. No body cares how much money you have and you don’t get to cash it in for God points when you die (though i can’t confirm this claim). Why would I care to have a powerful computer if I was to do everything i could to never use it?

If MS or Apple create an experiance that just blows me away and makes me love using the computer, go for it. If I need a faster computer to do it, so be it, then I have a reason to upgrade, stuff isn’t needed so only those who want it would do this, but make it there.

Can someone tell me the what desktop environment is he using? The main windows with the tabs, the one the says SkyOS… etc look pretty nice and professional. What theme is it and what program is he using?

You are right, the browser is Konqueror, but without any menubar or other space-wasting things. The look of the tabs, the toolbar, addressbar, etc. is a modified version of the KDE-theme ‘dotNET’. However, I really modified it a lot now, and I just need to fix some automake fixes, and release the theme as a 3.2 widget style named “Konx” on http://www.kde-look.org.

The fonts also look very nice. If possible, what’s the name of the font?

The font I use is ‘Tahoma’ size 8, it’s a TrueType font, and the standard font in Windows. Microsoft released a corefonts package with this font, so I think it’s legal, but you will have to find it and setup yourself since it isn’t included in standard distributations.

2004-05-06 10:52 am

Well, do you know of _any_ project which implemented some advanced window positioning?

So I had my important ‘always-on’ application docked in a right taskbar frame, which was never overlapped. And when I resized one window, the other became smaller.

However, I had to configure it for each application independently, so I never released the C source code to the public.

2004-05-06 11:26 am

twm

2004-05-06 11:39 am

And whats up with the grouped task bashing? Thats one of the features in XP i couldn’t do without. … I suppose those who don’t like it are also the type who don’t like tabbed browsers. Thats another thing people tend to hate till they try it for a bit and see how great it is.

I don’t use Windows often, but when I do, I absolutely can’t stand this behavior. The thing is, if I have half a dozen windows open from one program, chances are good that I’m going to be flipping between them frequently. So I’ll end up needing two (and generally more because I can always tell what I want by space and the icon, not always by title) clicks *very* frequently. On the other hand, when I have just one window from an application open, I’m often not using it. So basically it hides the ones I’m frequently looking for and leaving the ones I never have open.

Not to mention that I don’t tend to think of programs: I think of windows, files and tasks. Though I haven’t tried it, my impression is that I’d find MacOS X most unusable because it’s (meant to be) very application-based.

2004-05-06 11:55 am

Why is it that beveled edges and all of the other elements of a three-dimensional looking interface are viewed as either 1) fun eyecandy or 2) simply useless?

The three-dimensional appearance makes it much, much easier to sort out the information on the screen. For me at least.

As an example, I’m a java programmer and I use a number of IDE’s (eclipse, idea) on all THREE platforms (mac os x, win XP and linux). These programs provide exactly the same functionality using identical user interfaces on all three platforms. Yet when I use them on Mac OS X and turn on the native aqua look and feel, I seem to notice things that I never noticed on the other two platforms that use the flat “metal” look and feel, or even the native windows look-and-feel….. eventhough they were there all along. I’m convinced that the three-dimensional look makes things more visually obvious. You also have to do a lot less visual sorting and scanning to get to things.

The desktop link provided above as an “ideal” taskbar looked incredibly cluttered to me, NOT because it had a lot on it, but because of it’s flatness.

My eyes tire far less from using a three-dimensional-looking interface because it is less visual effort to find things.

I believe that this is NOT a mere aesthetic issue. For me anyway (and I’m sure for others, whether or not they are conscious of it), it is a major usability issue, and far, far from a waste of cpu cycles.

The top taskbar in this screenshot is an example of exactly what a taskbar should look like.

You’re kidding, right? That looks like 80’s-era motif!

2004-05-06 12:43 pm

I don’t use Windows often, but when I do, I absolutely can’t stand this behavior. The thing is, if I have half a dozen windows open from one program, chances are good that I’m going to be flipping between them frequently. So I’ll end up needing two (and generally more because I can always tell what I want by space and the icon, not always by title) clicks *very* frequently.

I guess this all depends on usage patterns. I find the grouping behavior very useful, but only when it’s set to always do it (instead of waiting for 3 or 4 windows to be open before grouping). The primary reason for this is because I don’t usually use the taskbar for application switching, but will use it to close an application if I have multiple windows open for that application. For general task switching I either have the windows laid out on the screen so I can see what I need from each window, or use alt+tab to switch between windows. With the alt+tab preview feature from “power toys” it’s fairly easy to find anything quickly if I’m not sure which instance I’m looking for.

Then again, I also use a fair number of programs that have tabbed interfaces (FireFox/MyIE2, VS.Net2003, NoteTab), so I generally don’t have nearly as many windows open as I do documents. On the other hand, I wish more applications handled documents the way Visual Studio does, as it would often be very helpful to be able to tile documents within an application without losing the tabbed behavior. If MS added this functionality into the .Net framework in an easy-to-use manner, I’m sure there would be a number of developers that would be very happy to use it.

2004-05-06 12:46 pm

I use KDE primarly on Linux. I turn off most of the eye candy. In 3.2.2 i create a OS X Doc like bar fo the top of the screen, using the clock, 6 buttons for programs, the virtual desktop and sys tray.

tasks are seperated by the desktop, on a auto hiding bar off to the top left corner of the screen. This allows for easy access with out being visible.

Virtual Desktops are sorted by relative tasks, one for Internet access(IRC, IM, web) one for file managment, one for local network shares, one for terminal access(with 4 konsoles open up in it) Sure it takes a while load all that up whenever I log in, then again I can just start working as soon as it does. Everything is ready to go.

2004-05-06 12:49 pm

kde question:

do you (or anybody else here) know how to change the color of windows in window list? i am able to change every color in control center, but not color of windows list …

2004-05-06 1:02 pm

And whats up with the grouped task bashing? Thats one of the features in XP i couldn’t do without. No more guessing as to which tiny little tab is the app you want. It’s not like windows does any massive shuffling of things around. when it throws things into a column you know right where they are, the relitive position is the same, just not spread across the screen. Give it a chance for a little while, it’s a major time saver and removes a ton of clutter. I know a few who don’t like it, but most seam to love it. I suppose those who don’t like it are also the type who don’t like tabbed browsers. Thats another thing people tend to hate till they try it for a bit and see how great it is.

I love tabbed browsing but I hate task grouping. Beside the app name, taskbar icons usually contain some app description (i.e. in IE, visited web page) that I can find out quickly with one glance without task grouping. Once the task descriptions start to disappear, it also serves as a reminder that I need to start closing some apps . Task grouping is annoying because it hides this information and force me to reach for my mouse to see it. I tend to keep my hand on my keyboard (alt+tab rules!) .

The thing that fascinates me is that you actually relate the dislike to task grouping and tabbed browsing. IE really gets out of hand very quickly, which is the primary reason I much prefer tabbed browsers. Tabbed interface in a sense is just like a ungrouped taskbar that localizes tasks to one application. I just hope people who actually like task grouping won’t infect task grouping to tabbed browsers. Imagine tabbed browser that uses ‘web-site-grouping’… *shudders*

On second thought, it may be a good idea. My firefox has too many tabs now…oh wait..no…I prefer not. Yay, I hope that any developers who design UI with task grouping would always put an option to turn it off. It’s personal preference after all.

2004-05-06 1:13 pm

From the article: “It does not try to arrange windows non-overlapping nor does it try to favor the keyboard in window management.”

Well, actually if you press the default F9 to show all apps windows shrinked on the screen you can move between them with the arrow keys. No mouse needed, thank you.

2004-05-06 1:17 pm

Until now I have used two window managers using task grouping: KDE and Windows XP.

KDE grays out minimized windows, and in the menu of a grouped task it puts them between brackets. In that way, I can easily handle all the open windows, as I can minimize all windows but the ones I use, and then easily switch between them.

Not so in XP. Because XP does not indicate what window is minimized, I find it difficult to find the right window.

So I guess it is not only the method you use, but also how you implement it. KDE should really patent that graying out of minimized windows 😉

Btw. I am really looking forward to a KDE version that does window snapping not only with moving but also with resizing. That would be great! Or is it already in 3.2?

2004-05-06 1:43 pm

I can’t believe no one has mentioned ratpoision (http://ratpoison.sourceforge.net/). From the site: “Ratpoison is a simple Window Manager with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence. It is largely modelled after GNU Screen which has done wonders in the virtual terminal market. The screen can be split into non-overlapping frames. All windows are kept maximized inside their frames to take full advantage of your precious screen real estate. All interaction with the window manager is done through keystrokes. ratpoison has a prefix map to minimize the key clobbering that cripples Emacs and other quality pieces of software. “

2004-05-06 2:27 pm

I have to agree with Mary above. There are perfectly valid reasons why “pixel-wasting”, 3D edges, etc… can actually be more ergonamic rather than less. And, there is good theory to back this up. One of the most oft-cited thinkers in this area is Edward Tufte, from his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and several other equally brilliant books. (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi)

One of Tufte’s main tenets: sometimes to clarify you need to add detail–as long as this detail is significant to the subject at hand. His book is full of examples where adding detail (especially 3D detail) actually makes the data much easier to grasp at an instant. His point is that detail should not be regarded as eye-candy, but as a significant attempt to understand how the brain interprets visual information.

Now, being a long time Unix-lover, I understand the desire of some to do away with useless clutter. However, I believe if you want to do away with clutter, then you should really do away with it, not just flatten it out and push it to some tiny rectangles at the edge of your screen. Ratpoison, mentioned above is a good example of simply doing away with point-and-click elements, and I have found it to be useful in some situations.

In the end, though, I simply work with too many things open at the same time to work without a fuller window manager. I keep going back to either Windowmaker or KDE. I tend to prefer Windowmaker for laptops, because of the great combination of keyboard shortcuts, and I love the way KDE has integrated the wheel mouse into everything, including switching virtual desktops.

2004-05-06 2:30 pm

Currently I use XFCE4 as my desktop environment.

I like it. I use virtual desktops for “task grouping”, window shading to keep my desktop somewhat clean. I’d love to have the functionality of e.g. fluxbox to stick windows together, and tab through them. Sometimes I do get a lot xterms cluttered on a desktop, and some way to clean that up would be nice.

I don’t think there’s a single desktop manager/window manager which does all that I want. And I don’t think there is a one size fits all window manager around (though microsoft seems to think they can invent one which will make *everyone* happy…ain’t gonna happen). So I pick what works best for me (and that’s sofar either the fluxbox straight on X or XFCE4), and I learn to live with features I got used to in the one, but lack in the other.

2004-05-06 2:32 pm

if i wouldn’t have to use real GUI’s to get my work done, and no – there is no commandline version of gimp yet, with which i can layout and design webapges, i would maybe opt for such a wm. yet, this sort of complicated looking ‘WM’, which sole purpose is only to have you feel geeky and exclusive while using linux is surely not what an “advanced” window manager should be like.

2004-05-06 2:51 pm

I was an Ion user for over a year before I bought my iBook. I absolutely love Expose on OSX, but it is by NO MEANS as powerful as Ion is. F9, tab, tab, tab, tab, space. Yay, got to my app without the mouse. Or.. alt+2. I think i’ll take the latter. I find expose is most useful for me when I already have the hand on the mouse, I just whip it to a corner, and select the window.

Ion is not beautiful by default, all of the themes it comes with are really quite horrible. It’s easily themed though, and so I made the theme like I wanted it, and after that I rarely got told it was ugly. I found Ion best suited for managing a ton of terminal windows, as those resize nicely. I had 10-20 terminal windows open at all time, and I could get to each one of them in very few keystrokes.

If I could replace OSX’s window manager with Ion, I’d be a happy man (and don’t start with the whole “run the X server…” as that doesn’t manage OSX native applications).

Before you go bashing it, and saying that it’s going back in time as far as usability goes, I highly suggest you give it a run for a month, configuring it to your liking. Struggling to find the window you want to go to is NOT a feature, and it irritates me whenever I’m using Windows and OSX. Oh how I miss Ion.

2004-05-06 3:06 pm

XFWM (in XFCE4) gets it pretty much right, IMHO. XFCE in general doesn’t give cluttered feeling. There’s a panel to one-click-launch applications. I let windows open over this panel and shade windows to access the panel. Windows snap into their places by default and it’s effortless to resize windows. Mouse right-clicking opens useful menus. I like to use pager in taskbar and move applications from one virtual desktop to another by mouse-dragging in the pager.

Here’s a screenshot (from the XFCE website) that shows XFCE taskbar with pager:

How did he get such beautiful fonts. I tried Truetype et-al none helped me. Please share you trick.

2004-05-06 3:23 pm

actually that is configurable ^_^

/me likes when windows stick own desktop regardless ^_^

if you forget where you placed something and want to quickly find it, in fluxbox, put the mouse over the toolbar and use the scroll button ^_^

2004-05-06 3:26 pm

KDE is a baroque jumble of stuff, but luckily, it’s so tweakable that you can do away with all the clutter if you want. I remove every applet that I don’t need and I’m left with only the date and time and the pager. I put the pager on the bottom right hand corner. That way, I can just quickly move the cursor to that corner and switch desktops with the mouse wheel. On the bottom left, I have the KDE menu, and a couple of icons for frequently used apps, as well as for scripts that I run frequently. In the middle, I have the taskbar, with no window menu. Everything that can be made transparent is transparent, which leaves the taskbar as the only non-transparent element. It makes for a nice, clean, bare look. Other than that, I have nothing else.

Yeah, if you do nothing other than browse the net, email, or the like blowing throught cpu time and ram is not bad, but if you have serious work you want to get done, it can be come a problem.

Problems it can cuase are bad video playback, slower running and execution of stuff that time critical, and the like.

Yeah, some is ok, such as pixmapping, but wasted space to ppl who want a clean desktop is annoying, which some ppl want. For those that don’t there are ones that are the complete opasite. Then there is the middle ground… see Enlightenment for that. It has a minimalistic look, with the ability to blow throught cpu time if you want it too.

2004-05-06 4:02 pm

Old is not necessarily bad, and something isn’t good just because it is new and different. If something is ugly, then say it is ugly and you don’t like ugly things. But the repeated references to things looking “out of date” or “a throwback to the 80’s” sounds really stupid.

2004-05-06 4:37 pm

I have 27 Virtual Desktops on my laptop…. and I like my window management manual.

I can picture myself being much more annoyed with the “intelligence” of my window manager than happy with it, if it actually did this. One app per desktop — like with two terminals — one to code, one to compile.

2004-05-06 4:55 pm

The reason I have so many is low resolution… I think I’ve finally made the best of 800×600 using small fonts and all the destkops… note that 90% of them aren’t being used, but when I do a lot of stuff they do get used check out the shot:

Aside from the posted aesthetic and usability advantages of bevels and other 3D features, a bevel is often a clickable part of the widget. And the fonts and symbols within 3D widgets usually can be sized to overlap bevels, if you want them maximized within the widget space.

2004-05-06 6:02 pm

what are you using to have apps (firefox, gimp, abiword, gimp) shrunk down on your screen like in your screenshot?

FVWM — being my window manager does that. It’s in the config file, basically there’s a routine when you iconify a window it takes a screenshot, scales it down, and that becomes the icon for it. It can be a slow process for larger windows, on my regular desktop 1280×1024 you can notice lag sometimes (and it’s a pretty buff system) on that one 800×600 it’s almost seemless. It’s a bit of a hack, but a nice thing to have — particularly if you have a lot of things minimized and want a quick way to discern them even if they’re using the same icon.

2004-05-06 6:45 pm

How do you handle task switching with fvwm? I`ve tried it a few times but the windowlist (which emulates the alt+tab behaviour) grabs the mouse pointer making it so irritating as to be unusable.

2004-05-06 7:58 pm

hmm, that looks a bit like a windows taskbar addon called bandit (as in band+it). basicly it would steal the content of any window you aimed it at and add it to itself. by dragging it of the taskbar and to one of the sides of the screen i could get allmost the same effect as what your showing in that screenshot…

2004-05-06 8:00 pm

“One of Tufte’s main tenets: sometimes to clarify you need to add detail–as long as this detail is significant to the subject at hand. His book is full of examples where adding detail (especially 3D detail) actually makes the data much easier to grasp at an instant. His point is that detail should not be regarded as eye-candy, but as a significant attempt to understand how the brain interprets visual information.”

Interesting. It makes me wonder wether the opposite is true for non-sense people (people who prefer to use intuition instead of one of their 5 senses to perceive information). That would be one of the reasons why some people prefer CLI.

“and I love the way KDE has integrated the wheel mouse into everything, including switching virtual desktops.”

That’s a handy shortcut in Enlightenment as well. I like Enlightenment for example for its nice themes and eyecandy as well as its customization and shortcuts. It doesn’t have a taskbar at all (it does have a systray which functions like that) so i use my 2 x 2 virtual desktops with it: from one virtual desktop can i switch to left/right to another one, while i can use shortcuts/mousewheel to switch to a desktop up/down leading to 50% more possible virtual desktops yet in an easy way. Looking forward to E17!

2004-05-06 8:13 pm

“So many people seam obsessed with using as little ram as possible or cpu as possible”

How do you “seam obsessed”, getting wild with the clothes iron??

2004-05-06 9:53 pm

Anand, the fonts on the screenshot are Tahoma, size 8. I asked the same question before

2004-05-06 9:53 pm

> and no – there is no commandline version of gimp yet, with which i can layout and design webapges

Have you tried ImageMagick? It might (or might not) be what you are looking for.

do you (or anybody else here) know how to change the color of windows in window list? i am able to change every color in control center, but not color of windows list …

Sorry, I really don’t understand your question

But if it can’t be done with standard color settings from kcontrol, the only possibility would be to write your own style, unfortunaltely

From the article: “It does not try to arrange windows non-overlapping nor does it try to favor the keyboard in window management.”

Well, actually if you press the default F9 to show all apps windows shrinked on the screen you can move between them with the arrow keys. No mouse needed, thank you.

Thanks for the clarification, I don’t have access to MacOS X so I could only write what I hear.

hmm, that looks a bit like a windows taskbar addon called bandit (as in band+it). basicly it would steal the content of any window you aimed it at and add it to itself. by dragging it of the taskbar and to one of the sides of the screen i could get allmost the same effect as what your showing in that screenshot…

hmm, cool, I have never heard of this application (and didn’t find a link on google either ).

And yes, basically my sidebar is working as you described it, however, for some applications like the tv-viewing application, I had to implement hooks, that by double-clicking the tv application, it would go fullscreen. This could not be achieved by a one-program-fits-all concept anyway.

Well but the good thing is, Ion handles this perfectly without the need to write a special ‘sidebar’ by my own, so thanks to Tuomo (the author of Ion).

Anand, the fonts on the screenshot are Tahoma, size 8. I asked the same question before

:), and I want to add, that I turned off antialiasing for sizes in between 7 and 13 pixels.

it seems the page of the creator (wwwholesoft.com) have gone belly up. i still have the installer sitting on my system tho. found a link to it on virtualplastic.net at one time (that page is slow to update these days)…

2004-05-07 11:23 am

FVWM — being my window manager does that. It’s in the config file, basically there’s a routine when you iconify a window it takes a screenshot, scales it down, and that becomes the icon for it.

So in appearance it is basically the OSX Dock, if I’m not mistaken. However, KDE also has such a module, and the disadvantage is that if you minimize a window that is overlapped by other windows, the minimized window is not redrawn before the screenshot is made.

2004-05-07 1:40 pm

Well, there’s alot of things that makes this different from the OS X Dock.

First of all it only follows the idea of representing minimized windows as thumbnails of the originals. It doesn’t do all the other things the Dock does – the consepts inherited from the days of NeXT.

Second of all I know it can’t do the resizing half as good OS X, despite the fact that I haven’t seen it in real life. Because of Apple’s Quartz Extreme engine, OS X can do amazing things without burdening the system too much. The Dock uses next to no CPU cycles for the resizing and will even change the size of an icon as you move the cursor over it.